I'm planning to replace my current, partitioned 80GB ATA100 hard drive with a 250GB ATA100 hard drive that I'll similarly partition. As before, it'll have both Win2K and WinXP put on it, in a multiboot arrangement. I need to use bigger partitions now, as I've practically run out of real estate on one of the partitions on the 80GB drive and don't have spare capacity anywhere else on it.

When I finally boot up into WinXP with the new, bigger drive, will I get a warning to re-activate Windows and therefore have to go online and re-register XP?

It's the full retail version of XP that I'm using and, as I understand it, the Licence allows me to use my copy of XP on one further machine, which is assumed to be an upgrade machine. In this case, of course, it's the same machine. But I guess that, with the way that Microsoft interrogates the PC, it'll obviously find a different hard drive to the one I had before and will wrongly conclude that this is a second machine.

You should be okay with the installation, provided that you don't use your old HDD to boot up XP. Most of these licenses are more concerned about two separate systems running the same license at the same time. They take into account that users will be upgrading pieces of their machine, like your scenario.

As for your retail version including usage on a second machine, I think that you may be mistaken by that. I could be wrong, but regular retail versions of an OS aren't usually multi-license copies.

Myke,

It was quite some time ago now when I first instaaled XP but, at the time, I took a very good look at the EULA Licence Agreeement when going through the Setup for the installation. It was definitely couched as to give the impression that the copy of XP could be used on a second, ALTERNATIVE machine. In other words, if the user wished to later upgrade his/her machine by upgrading its components or by the user buying a completely new machine without OS, that would be permitted. But, yes, I agree that normally a single-user licence is a single-user licence. Period. What that EULA didn't say, though - and this is really what I'm getting at - is whether in any of the permitted scenarios, Microsoft would still require the OS to be activated again.

packman,

Thanks for clarifying, as I think I may have missed what exactly you were looking for.

Regarding older versions of XP, we have machines which date back to 2001 with XP installed on them. The OS has been reinstalled multiple times on those machines, including different HDDs, and I've never encountered a problem before. In fact, I'm currently formatting and rebuilding 8 of these machines and have not run into any snags; Windows update is validating every installation and allowing the updates to proceed.

Conversely, I've tried to install XP with a machine which had Windows 98 SE installed on it and had no luck. The version could not be validated. So if your machine originally had XP on it, you should be safe.

Microsoft now uses a tool to validate that you are running a genuine copy of the OS, which completely replaces the activation of the OS. However, the Office suite still uses the activation action before it can be used.

I hope this is helpful or at least in the ballpark figure of what you are looking for. Sorry for being wordy with this.

I think there is another way to solve the problem.
You can download Disk Copy to copy the small disk to the new bigger one. This is a program based on sector to sector copy. So you can copy everything on the old disk to the new one including OS.
Importantly, this program is absolutely free for download!